Bay Lake Tower

(We no sooner returned from our little stay at Bay Lake when we were out the door again to go visit with some relatives)

Wednesday, March 1

Breakfast is coffee and apple danish in our room. When breakfast is done, we walk to the Magic Kingdom. The line to get through security stretches almost all the way back to the crosswalk between the Magic Kingdom walkway and the Contemporary parking lot. We don't have bags?? Can we bypass this?? The folks in front of us contend we can't. Gene walks around the line to check with security up at front. He starts waving me forward. As we approach, the front of the line, a security guard is now walking back along the line advising folks without bags that they can create a second line to the left to bypass the bag check area.

Once we are in the park, we see there are three vehicles waiting to drive up Main Street to the Castle. We select one and a cast member starts the slow ride along Main Street with the need to stop and beep a number of times at folks who don't seem to see the vehicle coming. The cast member tells us the vehicles only stay out until around 11 and then it becomes just too busy to continue to use them. She is trained in a number of other jobs around the Magic Kingdom so works those areas when the cars aren't in use. For example, she is trained to operate the steam train and also in crowd control so can be assigned to those areas when not driving the car. We haven't used one of these vehicles in a long time so it was fun to ride along the road instead of walking it.

We make our way to the railroad station and take the train all the way around the park. We make the tour of Swiss Family Treehouse - surprised by how many folks walk through this. We overhear one woman say it reminds her of Tarzan. Her companion tells her there was a Swiss family story on which the treehouse is based.Apparently, she has never heard this story. Makes me feel old.

We ride the magic carpets but pass by the jungle cruise's 40 minute standby line. Pirates is closed for refurbishment. Considered Splash Mountain but pass by the 40 minute standby line here as well. Just after we scan our fastpass bands to get on Big Thunder Mountain, the lines come to a virtual standstill. They announce the ride is temporarily down and they don't know how long it will be before it is running again. We don't want to lose our fastpass so stay put. A short while later, I get an e-mail message saying the ride is down and we can choose a different fastpass option. I'm guessing we got this e-mail since we had not yet gotten through the second fastpass scan area. Still, we decide to give it a few more minutes and things get going again. Overall, we ended up waiting about 20 minutes to get on the ride - not bad.

We head into the Haunted Mansion which only has a very short wait time but this will certainly change later in the day. The Riverboat is being refurbished so we skip by that. The Muppet history lesson is about to start so we stay and watch that as we've only seen snippets of it up until now. It's cute.

I wanted to go on the Carousel but there are scrims set up all the way around it and I did not want to ride the carousel enclosed in the scrims so we bypass it. They seem to have reintroduced the sword ceremony again as it is being performed as we pass by and this is the second time we have noticed that it is being done. However, Merlin is no longer part of this skit.

We go into Philharmagic. It is certainly a very full show!! It's time for out Peter Pan fastpass which is about the only way to get on this ride without waiting in a very long line. It's a Small World listed a 30 minute wait time but it didn't take that long to be seated in our boat for our watery world tour. Seven Dwarves is our last ride of the day and we also had a fastpass for that.

Somewhere along the way, we stopped for lunch which was at Casey's Corner on this day. We found a table outside and enjoyed our hot dogs.

After walking back to our room, we changed and headed for the pool area. My husband went in the pool and said it was chilly s I opted to stick with the hot tub. Went in the hot tub a couple of times and hung out in between dips in the tub.

Back in our room, we changed again and then hung out on our balcony for a while. When we felt like we wanted some dinner, we walked over to the Wave. There was plenty of room at the bar so we sat there and had our meal. My husband had a burger. I had the Chicken Coq Au Vin which was quite yummy!!

After dinner, we walked back over to Bay Lake and went to Top of the World. Our server remembered us from the evening before and even remembered what we had ordered to drink. She was a very good server!! When it was almost time for the fireworks, we headed outside to watch then where we had a nice conversation with a young dad from Toronto - his son was much more excited with seeing monorails than the fireworks!!

When the fireworks ended, we headed back to our room to watch the fireworks we could see from Epcot.

Bay Lake Tower - Part 2